Let me tell you the tale of Top of the Pops.
Since 1964 every Thursday evening
Britain's youth would watch the ever-shifting weekly singles chart show on BBC One.
With performances from the most exciting bands
all in the run-up to the number one song in the country of that week.
It is fondly remembered but that's not to say that it was ever that good:
The performances were mimed to backing tracks, the vocals mostly lip-synced
and the presenters were as cheesy as the pop music.
But despite this Top of the Pops was a very big deal.
If your band had caught on to the show you had in some small way made it in the pop world.
It stands as a perfect archive of over 42 years of the British charts
And the performances still live on in the public consciousness:
The first glimpse of Ziggy Stardust,
The public debate over Culture Club's Boy George,
the Battle of Britpop.
But not all performances on the show went as smoothly as others.
Some are iconically bad or shambolic.
So who couldn't take the miming seriously,
whose backdrop consisted of an 80s darts legend
and who prompted 20,000 angry phone calls from a single outing?
This is a short history of the best worst performances on Top of the Pops.
One of the aspects that is synonymous with Top of the Pops is the mimed performances.
This was a result of the Top of the Pops studio not being set up for live sound
and pop groups not being able to sing or play the instruments perfectly on cue.
Pretending to do so was a necessity.
But if you aren't a prefabricated pop group that whole pretense seems very silly indeed,
ripe for parody.
One of the first cases of an act sending up that aspect of the show
was in 1971 when Rod Stewart appeared to perform "Maggie May" with the Faces in tow.
While Rod's vocals are indeed live
by the solo Ronnie Wood is making very little effort in looking like he is actually playing his guitar
By the final verse they've all given up
preferring to have a bit of a kick about about with a ball that has appeared on stage.
And who's that awkwardly wielding the mandolin?
it's Radio One DJ and sometime Top of the Pops presenter John Peel.
After this performance, the pantomime was known.
The bubble had been burst and not taking it completely seriously was now an option.
Coming in the aftermath for such defining glam rock performances as T. Rex playing "Hot Love",
David Bowie playing "Starman"
and any number of Slade appearances
came Mud and their 1974 seasonal chart-topper "Lonely This Christmas"
Guitarist Rob Davis is dressed for the season, decked out in tinsel and wearing baubles as earrings.
The highlight though is singer Les Gray who's brought on a puppet to do backing vocals.
The puppet also managed to deliver the song's iconic spoken word section with a straight face
which Gray is unable to do
"'Cause Darling, this is the time of year that you really, you really need love"
"When it means so very very much."
Despite the band not taking it all too seriously, the song remained at number 1 for 4 weeks.
Punk bands had a love to hate relationship with Top of the Pops.
On the one hand it was the system and had to be raged against
but on the other hand appearing on one of the most watched shows on television
could potentially convert a lot of kids to the punk side
When The Stranglers appeared in 1978 for their top 20 single "No More Heroes"
they had a bit of fun with the format.
Bassist JJ Bernal spending the first minute trying to waft the dry-ice offstage,
before an impressive no-handed solo from Hugh Cornwell
When the Boomtown Rats went on in conjunction with their 1979 number one "Rat Trap"
singer Bob Geldof filled in for the visibly absent saxophone player by ripping that riff on a candelabra
Despite being one most frequently charting punk bands in the UK
The Clash never appeared on Top of the Pops
but the alternative was all the more surreal.
Up until the 90s, for tracks that were rising up the charts
where the band were not performing nor had they a music video
Top of the Pops would get one of their dance troupes to do a way to literal interpretive dance
which Legs & Co did for The Clash's 1980 hit "Bank Robber."
Alternatively you could just get off your face before the performance
as Shane MacGowan from The Pogues did prior to performing "Fairytale of New York" with Kirsty McColl
Drunk, swaying and completely unable to mouth the words in time
"'The Rare Old Mountain Dew'/ I turned my face away"
Most of the time when something is slightly off with a Top of the Pops performance
the band is at fault.
Not the case with an infamous Dexys Midnight Runners performance.
Their follow-up to their number one hit "Come On Eileen"
was a cover of Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile)"
"Jackie Wilson said, "It was great news to see"
"I kind of love you, baby/ It knocks me off my feet"
" Let it all come down"
They're coinciding appearance on Top of the Pops was fairly uneventful
except for one piece of bizarre production design.
Behind the band as they played was a picture of a smiling rotund man.
If you were big on 80's darts you would be able to identify him as Scottish darts player Jockie Wilson.
The song is not referencing a darts player,
but instead American soul singer Jackie Wilson.
Over 35 years since the mistake,
no one has confirmed whether this was intentional or a misunderstanding.
Sometimes though bands were allowed to play live on Top of the Pops
Elton John, The Who and Iron Maiden all played live,
their musical credibility winning out against pop fluffiness.
But New Order's first appearance on Top of the Pops playing "Blue Monday" was also live.
It could be said that their offering is why bands were not usually allowed to play live.
Simply put, it's a disaster.
"I thought I was mistaken."
"And I thought I heard you speak."
The studio not being used to live sound creates this weird unbalanced audio mix
with increasingly wonky sounding synths overpowering everything
The MIDI sequences are also wildly out of sync with everything else
Bassist Peter Hook recalled to MOJO Magazine:
Generally most bands appearing on Top of the Pops would get a sales increase the next week.
Legend has it that after the trainwreck version of "Blue Monday"
the track slipped down the charts the following week.
According to the UK charts database "Blue Monday" actually went from number 17 to number 14
an increase of three places.
But as New Order's label owner Tony Wilson famously stated:
Miming is easy enough or is it?
Darkly romantic band All About Eve were seemingly tripped up by this most simple of tasks.
When promoting their single "Martha's Harbour"
singer Julianne Regan and guitarist Tim Bricheno sat stock still as the track played in the background
What had happened was that due to a studio error,
the track wasn't playing through their monitor for the first half of the song.
By the second verse an unseen stagehand had alerted the band to the error
and so they began their extremely embarrassed performance from there.
Despite this the track rose in the charts the proceeding week and the band were invited back.
This time the band insisted on playing it live.
For a few years from 1991 the show adopted a live vocal to pre-recorded backing track policy.
This would eventually be removed
due to a vast number of acts being unable to reproduce quality vocal performances live
but before it's phasing out
we got perhaps the most famous clip from the rock leaning side of Top of the Pops:
Nirvana's performance for "Smells Like Teen Spirit."
Miming to the backing track bassist Krist Novoselic mugs for the camera
and drummer Dave Grohl does his best impression of Animal from the Muppets.
But singer Kurt Cobain as always is the one to watch.
While barely playing guitar he not only changes the song's first lyrics
but croons the song an octave lower than on record.
By the pre-chorus he is barely audible as he fellates the microphone.
Asked about it later, Cobain stated he wanted to sound like Morrissey.
The performance ends in a stage invasion.
The band would not be asked back
By the 90s Top of the Pops was changing.
Electronic dance songs of which the musical makeup was samples, synths and loops
rather than vocals, guitars and drums
were visually not as interesting to reproduce on Top of the Pops.
This was demonstrated when Orbital was supposed to perform their 1990 hit "Chime"
The dance act's two members Phil and Paul Hartnell just stood around for the track's entirety
with the occasional button press.
Whether out of spite or just because that's how they would play the song in the live environment
it's hard to say.
The focus instead was shifted to the sole raver girl dancing her heart out for the entirety of the track,
intensifying by comparison the lack of effort that the Hartnell brothers were putting in.
Taking dance music performances not being entertaining to the nth degree
were ambient house act The Orb in 92.
Due to the chart information network, the body that controls the UK Singles Charts,
changing the maximum permissible length of a single from 25 minutes to 40 minutes,
The Orb decided to release the 39 minutes 57 seconds version of their track "Blue Room" as a single.
This charted at number 8 and the group got on Top of the Pops.
A three minute snippet of the track was played over the top
of producers Alex Paterson and Kris Weston playing chess,
with Weston holding a toy sheep
And that was it. That was the whole performance.
Said Manic Street Preachers guitarist Nicky Wire to the NME in 1992:
The Manic Street Preachers appeared on the show many times
but never did they actually self immolate.
The closest they got metaphorically at least
was their rip through the Holy Bible's was first single "Faster" when it reached number 16 in June 1994.
They arrived in combat fatigues
with singer James Dean Bradfield wearing a balaclava with his first name chalked on his forehead
The song itself was described by lyricist Richey James Edwards as about self-abuse
and had such darkly humorous nihilistic lyrics as:
Believing the band was showing support for Irish paramilitary group the IRA
Top of the Pops got the most complaints they've ever received from one performance.
The band were told it was something in the region of 20,000 separate complaints.
It makes you wonder how many they would have got if they actually set themselves on fire.
Perhaps most glaring 'fuck you' to the idea of professionalism
is from indie band Travis in 2001 when they came on to celebrate their number three single "Sing."
The performance is pretty by the numbers for the first two thirds of the song
aside from a lobster taped the microphone.
But then a food fight breaks out,
singer Fran Healey getting hit by a custard pie so hard he's unable to sing straight:
Anarchy reigns soon after, with band members slipping all over the place on spent cream.
The backing track continuing unabated.
Why did the band decide to do this?
it was in fact to mimic their music video
which features the band disrupting a posh dinner party with flung pastries.
After various format changes and moving broadcast date to Friday instead of Thursday
Top of the Pops closed its stages in July 2006.
Going up against British television heavyweight Coronation Street in the same timeslot
alongside increasing diversity in watching options Top of the Pops fell by the wayside.
The last performance was Snow Patrol with their *number six hit "Chasing Cars"
Symbolic of the middle-of-the-road balladry that late naughties pop radio had become.
Did Top of the Pops lose favor because pop became boring
or did pop music become a whole lot less interesting without Top of the Pops' backing?
Either way its end was an end of an era for popular music.
The wide-eyed theatrics of Kate Bush,
Morrissey from the Smiths singing into some gladioli,
the arrival of the Spice Girls and Girl Power.
No longer does the UK have a show that encompasses the shifting climate of the Singles Charts
and as such Top of the Pops is greatly missed.
The ups, the downs and those much coveted number ones.
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